Ventricular remodeling is defined as changes in size, shape and function of the heart after cardiac injury (i.e., acute myocardial infarction). Adverse ventricular remodeling leads to development of heart failure (HF). Accurate quantitative assessment of ventricular remodeling (i.e., shape and shape deformation) is instrumental both for diagnosis and prognosis and to follow the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions.
Conventionally, many techniques used in actual clinical settings are based on two-dimensional (2D) left ventricle (LV) contours, such as sphericity index and subsequently conicity index. These methods lack specificity and only describe limited aspects of the LV. To achieve regional quantification of LV shape parameters, it has been proposed to use curvature analysis on ventricular outlines. While this concept applies to 2D curves, a more recent proposal is to using Gaussian curvature as a descriptor of regional LV geometry. Other researchers have measured regional LV shape deformation by comparing three-dimensional (3D) subject-specific models of LV with a baseline surface with respect to some distance functions. Other more sophisticated methods aim to analyze LV shape and motion based on volumetric deformable models. More recently, an image analysis technique based on principal component analysis has been used to assess regional ventricular shape.
Nevertheless, there is still a lack of an efficient and clinically meaningful way to capture and quantify complex 3D LV conformational data.